The present invention relates to data stored onboard a vehicle's electronic control unit, and more particularly to a system and method for retrieving, converting and formatting data from the electronic control unit in the vehicle.
The software employed onboard vehicles' electronic control units (ECU) is becoming more capable and complex, and the amount of data being processed is increasing dramatically. Some of this data is stored in nonvolatile memory—also called keep alive memory (KAM)—which can be retrieved and processed at a later time. The ability to efficiently obtain and process this ECU data from the nonvolatile memory may facilitate the verification of the quality of the design, manufacturing and calibration of various electronic control systems. This ECU data may be particularly useful during development testing. This ECU data may also be used to obtain operator driving habits, detect degraded components, and assist in solving service concerns in the field. Consequently, storing data in nonvolatile memory onboard the ECU and retrieval of this data is a very sought-after function.
An example of such a desirable use is the storing and retrieval of data related to a transmission adaptive pressure table. This data may be employed by engineering and testing personnel to determine the quality of the design, manufacturing and calibration of the pressure control system on developmental and durability test vehicles. Other examples of desirable uses for data stored in ECU nonvolatile memory relate to parametric data—also called flight recorder data. Such parametric data may include electronic throttle control data and transmission fault data. This data may be later retrieved and employed to help solve service concerns in the field.
While retrieving this ECU data may be desirable, this increases the complexity of the onboard software needed to store this data, increases the size requirements of the onboard memory, and increases the load on the data communication network. Thus, locating and retrieving the data is a more complex and time-consuming process than is desirable. Moreover, different vehicle models and different model year vehicles may not even store the data for a particular vehicle function in the same format or locations. This further increases the complexity and time taken to retrieve the data since one must find out where the data is stored before being able to retrieve it.
Since the amount of data to be stored in the onboard memory of the vehicle is large and increasing as newer vehicles and systems are produced, much of the data is stored as raw data. That is, it is not formatted or labeled for ease of use by vehicle developers or service technicians since doing so would further increase the amount of information stored in onboard memory and increase the amount of data that would have to be transferred through the data communications network when retrieving the data.
Thus, it is desirable to have an ECU data retrieval and formatting system and process that can operate in a generic manner across different vehicle lines and model years to easily allow one to retrieve the onboard data for a particular vehicle function and have that data presented in a user-friendly format. Moreover it is desirable that such a system and process can accomplish these functions while minimizing both the onboard memory requirements and the load (bandwidth required) on the data communication network.